Russian-Kyrgyz relations have deteriorated sharply. Russia
is dissatisfied with Kyrgyz plans to shut down a russian military base, and
Bishkek demands to replace the General Secretary of the Collective Security
Treaty Organization (CSTO). The new apple of discord became the Dastan torpedo
producing plant, which Moscow is seeking to control.

Last year, when Atambayev threatened
to shut down the U.S. base in Kyrgyzstan, analysts seemed to react in one of
two ways: Atambayev was steering Kyrgyzstan toward a new, pro-Russia stance
(focusing as well on his endorsement of the Eurasian Union), or he was just
sort of angling for more money to coast out the last six months of 2014 until
the whole question becomes moot anyway (I still lean toward the latter
interpretation).

However, the latest round of tensions between Bishkek and
Moscow might suggest something more: Atambayev doesn't want any foreign
domination or bases on Kyrgyz territory, including from Russia. Atambayev essentially rejected the Russian bid for a major
share of Dastan. In 2009, Russia offered
Kyrgyzstan a $300 million aid package and $2 billion in other spending, which
was widely presumed to have inspired then-president Kurmanbek Bakiev to demand
the U.S. leave the Manas Transit Center (he eventually agreed to a massive
increase in lease payments in exchange for continued U.S. presence). But Russia
also offered, as a part of that deal, to buy a 48% share
in the Dastan munitions plant as part of a $198 million debt forgiveness
package. It was meant to be a double-whammy: erase debt, get a hundred and
fifty million dollars on top of that, all in exchange for a torpedo factory.

Atambayev doesn't seem to consider that such a good deal.
And if he's both rejecting the Dastan deal and telling the Russians to get out
of their base at Kant, and suggesting the CSTO get a new General Secretary ...
well things in Kyrgyzstan are getting a lot more interesting.

In a way, though, it's not really a surprise that Atambayev
is not terribly interested in being Russia's proxy in Central Asia. No leader
there really wants to be, even if Kazakhstan seems much more like Russia in
many ways than it does the rest of Turkestan. One of the few constants in
Central Asian politics, I think, and especially in their foreign policy, is the
quest to successfully triangulate between the many foreign powers seeking to
gobble up resources and access. While Russia enjoys warmer relations with most
of their governments than does the U.S. or China, they aren't that much warmer,
and all told the memory of being part of the USSR lingers just enough to keep
any leader from selling the farm, so to speak, to Moscow.

So where does Kyrgyzstan go from here? That's a big
question. Atambayev isn't showing his cards just yet, but we can make some
speculation based on his public statements. He has requested, repeatedly, that
the U.S. military leave Manas when the lease expires in June of 2014. U.S.
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was in Kyrgyzstan just the
other week trying to lay the foundation for a longer U.S. military presence
there. From what we know in public, it hasn't worked yet.

Atambayev has also rejected Russian bids
to maintain a permanent military base there, and is not enthusiastic about
allowing Russia controlling ownership in that Dastan torpedo plant either.
That, might mean that he's not swinging back and forth like a pendulum
(U.S.-Russia-U.S.-Russia) but actually trying to carve out a separate, independent
space from which to negotiate his external relations.

Of course, everyone wants to do that in the region. And
Kyrgyzstan has famously failed to execute the so-called "multivector
foreign policy" under Bakiev. So there's no guarantee that this will stick.
In all likelihood, one power or another is going to offer some outrageous
amount of money and throw the system into imbalance again, which is probably
what Atambayev wants anyway: more currency, more wrangling over Kyrgyzstan's
hand, more competition for influence.

Kyrgyzstan can only benefit from
playing hard-to-get. So long as Afghanistan remains unsettled, Kyrgyzstan (and
especially access to basing in Kyrgyzstan) will be coveted by both the U.S. and
Russia, and they will pay dearly for it. Figuring out how to maneuver and gain
advantage in such a space is not an easy trick for U.S. or Russian
policymakers, and as long as they don't quite have congruous goals in the
region it's not likely they'll team up to force concessions out of the Kyrgyz
government.

So in a few months, let's check back and see how all the
various deals and arrangements have changed. They'll mostly be much the same as
they are now.

Joshua Foust is a fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. He is also a member of the Young Atlanticist Working Group.
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Joshua's research focuses on the role of market-oriented development strategies in post-conflict environments, and on the development of metrics in understanding national security policy. He has written on strategic design for humanitarian interventions, decision-making in counterinsurgency, and the intelligence community's place in the national security discussion. Previous to joining ASP, Joshua worked for the U.S. intelligence community, where he focused on studying the non-militant socio-cultural environment in Afghanistan at the U.S. Army Human Terrain System, then the socio-cultural dynamics of irregular warfare movements at the National Ground Intelligence Center, and later on political violence in Yemen for the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Joshua is a columnist for PBS Need to Know, and blogs about Central and South Asia at the influential blog Registan.net. A frequent commentator for American and global media, Joshua appears regularly on BBC World, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy's AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor.